This op-ed explores how, in the view of the author, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has effortlessly achieved what past Nigerian leaders could not, leading to a de facto restructuring of Nigeria without the need for political debate. This opinion piece delves into the unique responses of different regions during the August 1, 2024, nationwide protest.
President Bola Ahmed Tinubu should count himself lucky. What he feared most has happened to him. What his predecessors in office could not do, he has done effortlessly. What others before him, including him, had used in the past to deceive Nigerians while campaigning but would never do when they got to the office, God has made it happen for Tinubu seamlessly!
Nobody can use it for political sloganeering anymore. Nigeria is “restructured” without anyone calling for a roundtable discussion. Nature abhors a vacuum. The cosmic has taken care of our desires.
We can no longer live under the pretense of Nigeria being one. The August 1, 2024 “nationwide protest” is no protest that has taken care of that for us. I have never believed in the “protest.” I have never thought that it would achieve anything. But I have been proved wrong! The ‘protest’ has brought to the fore the uniqueness of the three regions that constitute Nigeria.
The North has remained monolithic with the outcome of the “protest” over there. Those children of the North have demonstrated to us in practical forms what their forebears had hidden from us for ages. The North does not think like the rest of the nation. Hunger also has its different forms.
We now know that anything becomes edible when people are hungry in the North. Computers now taste like masara (maize). Furniture tastes like tuwo shinkafa delicacies. Concrete slabs and iron rods are jollof rice spices.
“Nigeria is ‘restructured’ without anyone calling for a roundtable discussion. Nature abhors a vacuum. The cosmic has taken care of our desires.”
One of the “protesters” in Kano carried a placard with the inscription that the price of “weed” (Indian Hemp) should be reduced. I agreed with him. Once one is dazed, hunger will no longer be felt!
What afflicts the North is different from what afflicts the South. It is like the affliction of the mother being different from that of her child. The child cries for breast milk, while the mother needs a plate of amala to lactate well!
Even in preparing for the “protest,” the North had its own agenda. It became clear to us all that what afflicts them is the temporary loss of power to the South. So, the “protest” allowed the North’s leaders to relieve themselves of frustration.
Their foot soldiers, who invaded the Palace of the Sultan of Sokoto in the name of a #EndBadGovernance “protest“, openly asked for the Military to take over. Their war cry was Sojaji muke, so (Soldiers take over). For them, lousy governance ends only when the Military takes over and General Halidu Maisari Maiduguri is announced as the Head of State! Shame!
In Kano, they paraded the streets, flying Russian flags! Yes, the North has a message for us in the “protest“: we would rather go our way than lose power to the South. My reading of the “protest” over there, of course. Why those boys did not shout yancin kai (independence) or araba (secession) beats my imagination!
I have been wondering if any leader in the North who contributed to the warped reasoning of those untrainable children we saw in the various videos of the “protest” has sat down to ruminate over the creatures the region has donated to the Federation.
What goes on in their minds now, I mean the leaders over there, who for decades have held the poor children of the North down, depriving them of any vestige of education? Do they think, as I do, that the next round of “protest” will come for them, the leaders? I can imagine (God forbid o) that in the name of a “protest“, I found myself in a library! The police and other state authorities would arrest me reading! I can’t imagine how I could take my eyes off the collections in the library and how many synopses of the books I quickly wanted to read.
“We can no longer live under the pretense of Nigeria being one.”
But not so with the “protesters” of the North. The brooms, waste bins, and window frames are of more value to them. Someone made them like that. We are all in trouble. So much for the “protesters” across the Niger River! A Mas’ud Muhammad Yakubu, who claimed to be a “Youth Corper” in the Federal University, Dutse, and holds a B. Sc in Criminology and Security Studies, captures the whole event in his “I am afraid we have a problem in Kano!” piece that has since gone viral!
Let us look at the “protest” in the South-East. I say this with every sense of honesty: if there is any time I wish I were of Igbo stock, it is now. During the preparation for the “protest“, I was apprehensive. I asked myself whether the Ndigbo would allow the thunder to strike them for the second time on the same spot. I was alarmed.
The genocidal campaign against the Ndigbo over the “protest” was palpable and very ominous! Who would talk to my kedu, odinma brothers; who would lend them brains? Lagos was waiting for them. The “Oro Court,” as my great senior and Students’ Union President at the Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Ile-Ife, Akeem Adeola Soetan, is wont to call them, was waiting for the Ndigbo in Lagos.
Alas! The Ndigbo proved to be the wisest of all “protesters”! Rather than hit the streets and be slaughtered as happened in the 1966 pogrom in the North, the Ndigbo hit their homes. They borrowed the debased cliché of Senator Godswill Akpabio, our Senate President, who said that while those who wanted to protest could go ahead, he and other warped minds would be in their homes making merriment!
The sons and daughters of Ndigbo did what those waiting in the wings for them did not expect. They stayed indoors, drinking and winning. One of them, a friend, even dared to send me a video of him eating ugba and fish and washing it down with fresh juice. Ka bu ndu, (is this life?) was my response!
There was peace even in their five states of Abia, Anambra, Ebonyi, Enugu, and Imo. Rather than making themselves available for the security agents kitted with deadly arsenals to “curtail” the “protest” in the East, the Ndigbo locked up their shops and imposed on themselves “sit-at-home”!
“What afflicts the North is different from what afflicts the South. It is like the affliction of the mother being different from that of her child.”
In frustration, and somewhere in Lagos, when the ‘waiting-in-the-wings’ state thugs stationed to “deal” with the Igbo boys and girls that would come out to protest, they mistook a Yoruba lady, one Olufunmilayo for an Igbo. I watched the video of the encounter, and I shook my head. Does hunger separate tribes? What if Olufunmilayo had turned out to be an Ibo lady? That is the question I have not been able to answer.
Granted, we have so many Ndigbo guys who could be better. I have encountered a lot of them. But the Ndigbo are in good company, as other tribes of the nation also have their fair share of the bad and the ugly. We also have so many fantastic ones that you would wish to be an Ndigbo through.
Every tribe has such two categories. Even the North has many other fellows who are more rational in thinking than many educated Southerners. So, why should we prepare the slaughter slabs for an ethnic group over a “nationwide protest” because our man is in power? What is the difference between the proponents of the “Ndigbo must go” campaign and the Kano boys who went to a library and looted brooms and dustbins, leaving books intact?
“Now that the Ndigbo have shown they can be ‘peaceful’ in the face of State provocation, who carries the shame?”
We are talking of hunger that is ravaging the entire nation here. But even at that, there are still some people who don’t feel the pang like others. If a bag of rice goes for N100,000 today, and a bag of beans goes for N500,000, that Alaba International Market Igbo traders will buy them, while the ora esa (all right sir) streets urchins unleashed on the ‘protesters’ will still be on the streets begging!
Now that the Ndigbo have shown they can be “peaceful” in the face of State provocation, who carries the shame? This, however, does not mean that the South-East is entirely free from the disorder that afflicts the entire country. But in this instance, the region has demonstrated that it could do things differently from the “nzogbu nzogbu” battle cry!
That is a new lesson for us, as the East thinks differently. But the greatest “restructuring” from the South-East to the rest of us in this “protest” is that should the country go aflame, the Ndigbo will watch from afar. I may be wrong!
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Now, we come to the “sophisticated” South-West, and a great extent, the South-South. I wept for Yorubaland! The region proved to be the most unfortunate group in the “protest,” which ensured that everything about the hunger in the land resulted from the “hatred” for Tinubu! I feel so ashamed each time I come across the state-sponsored narratives that have emanated from the South-West over this “protest“. Again, the pro-government groups and individuals in the South-West have also shown that Nigeria is a superglued nation!
For many of these “Hallelujah” groups, it doesn’t matter if Tinubu performs in office or not as long as a Yoruba man is there! They don’t care if or not their man would be leaving behind any legacy. These are the set of people (very many of them hungry and beggarly) who have taken the “Èmilókán” campaign to a level that no matter how fatuous a government policy is, as long it is Tinubu that initiated it, “all true sons and daughters of Yorubaland” must embrace it! To them, with that thinking faculty, hunger in the land is caused by people losing elections. The inability of farmers to go to their farms because of farmers’/herders’ clashes can be traced to election losers. The floating of the Naira, poor economic policies of the government, and the extravagance at all levels of government are all about 2027. Pity!
“In Kano, they paraded the streets, flying Russian flags! Yes, the North has a message for us in the ‘protest’: we would rather go our way than lose power to the South.”
When you have a president surrounded by unfeeling aides, you cannot but have the type of address that President Tinubu delivered on Sunday to the “protesters” and their agitations, where the President said nothing! I never expected anything from Aso Rock, and when I got nothing, I was least bothered! “There’s something I have to tell you: How to communicate difficult news in tough situations” is authored by Charles Foster, a licensed psychotherapist.
In closing, I have something to tell President Tinubu thus: “Sir, there was no protest on August 1. You have nothing to fear. That is why your broadcast did not convey anything!“
The opinions expressed in this article are strictly those of the author, and does not necessarily align with the views of JolibaLive News! or any of its staff members. The author is in no way associated with this online news blog.
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